The Places In Between with Rory Stewart - Conversations with History

this program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UC TV programs [Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Rory Stewart who is a member of the British Parliament from Penrith and the border he's the author of numerous books including the New York Times bestseller the place in the places in between and also the author of the Prince of the marshes his most recent publication with Gerald mouse is can intervention work Rory welcome to Berkeley thanks where were you born and raised I was born in Hong Kong and a lot of my childhood was spent in Malaysia and looking back how did your parents shape your thinking about the world my father is much older than me so he's 50 years older than me he was 50 when I was born and he is a man who has been civil servant but is also a sort of natural rebel so his basic character is defined by feeling that all his colleagues in the whole civil service sir not getting on with things he's a very sort of active vigorous person still it's I mean he's just about a turn 91 and he's still charging up and down digging things up and cutting down trees and causing trouble for people so I think that that's what I took from him I mean he's his central motto in life is get on with it and your mother my mother was an academic and she I think it's an enormous important influence on my life but in in a strange way I I don't see her quite in the way that I see my father when I think about my father I think about this very eccentric colorful figure in tartan trousers charging around causing trouble my mother who's actually a very active vigorous person I somehow see a sort of more natural quieter part of my life I didn't see her it's quite a extreme of caricature as I see my father and your father was stationed abroad so you you were seeing the world as a young person already that's right so he was a man who served in the Second World War and then was sent to Malaya straight after that so he served all over Asia he served Philippines Shanghai Beijing Burma Hong Kong Vietnam and I think a loss of my whole way of looking at world was was created by the fact that we're from a Scottish family but a Scottish family that it's really been connected with the army with the Foreign Service and therefore been on the move and was there discussion of world events around the dinner table or was it all through osmosis a lot of it was osmosis my father does talk a lot but he would tend when I was a child to be lecturing me on Napoleon or proofs of the existence of God when I was 6 or he he will pick up books and then get excited about particular themes they tended not to be world events they tend to be a particularly historical philosophical issue he was interested and and where were you educated before you went to college so I was and as she sent to school in London when I was 4 then when I was 6 I went to school in Malaysia and Kuala lumper and then when I was 8 and a half I was sent back to boarding school in England my parents continued to live in Malaysia and Hong Kong and I was educated at a school in Oxford and then I went to Eton and then I left that and went into the Army in the nineteen of us and and what what subjects attracted you in your higher education I initially loved history and then decided to change to study philosophy I remember being stuck looking at some document on how many people in rural Westphalia went to church in the 1490s and suddenly feeling I really don't care [Laughter] so and as I understand it you were in the military before before you went to Oxford talk a little about that what what unit were you in and so on I was in the Black Watch which is a very traditional Highland Scottish regiment which has been my father's regiment and my grandfather's regiment and deep my my great-grandfather and it was a very strange time this was the early 1990s so cold war had ended nothing else had already begun nobody in my regiment her that she's been to war since the Korean War for forty years two generations have gone through and it was almost unimaginable for me then that we would suddenly find ourselves as indeed the regiment did in Bosnia and Kosovo in Iraq and Afghanistan it felt like a strange unit stuck in the middle of Britain preparing for some war against the Soviet Union which clearly was never going to happen and and so talk a little about so this this is really your your first encounter with an intervention abroad and so what what we're what were you seeing and thinking as this this regiment was stationed there I suppose it was a strange time I mean I I joined the army when I was 18 as a young infantry officer and I felt at the time that it wasn't quite what I expected I thought that being in the Army was gonna be full of incredible excitement and charging around and actually we were based in a barracks in England doing a lot of drill and training without much money and a certain amount of my time was spent dealing with court cases my soldiers were get into trouble in town and I'm going to represent them in court a lot of my time seemed to be spent doing strange pieces of paperwork and worrying about the fact that we're now blank rounds for any body to fire that there was a sort of slight element I think of somewhere between catch-22 and mash my whole introduction to the thing so but but you would did this probably was your first encounter with a bureaucracy in the structure of a bureaucracy yeah and indeed I've gone on into many bureaucracies I mean I you know I in different ways I was my most recent job was at Harvard University which was another sort of strange bureaucracy where I remember turning up for my first day and taught my class and I got back and then I said to her really well what am I supposed to do now and and I just felt this sort of great silence all the way around me and the sense that whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing I couldn't quite grasp it I couldn't quite grasp the the function the institution I feel the same in Parliament I mean I feel that I I keep going into these great ancient institutions a British Army Harvard University the British Parliament and I have a sense that they were designed for quite a different purpose for what they're now doing and that we have all these rituals and buildings and things that we do but exactly why we're doing them or what the benefit is to anybody is sometimes quite difficult to find and so this is this is your your father's DNA roaring with you in response to the settings you're finding yes I'm afraid so I'm afraid my father sort of encourages this sense of impatience so after the military you went into the Diplomatic Service that's right and I know the bureaucracy another bureaucracy another bureaucracy and I was posted to Indonesia initially where I learned Indonesian and I spent two and a half years trying to understand the end of su Hutus Indonesia that was another big introduction to me because I arrived in 1997 when the Indonesian economy was booming and everybody said this economy is unstoppable I remember in August 97 a big seminar in Jakarta and they said this economy is like an aircraft carrier it's growing 8% this year you know maybe next year it might drop down to 7% but basically it's unstoppable the currencies at 2,000 of the dollar and within two months everything had collapsed the economy went into a 17 percent contraction 98% of the companies and the stock exchange gone bankrupt the currency had gone from two thousand to seventeen thousand to the dollar and by May we had riots in the streets ooh hot is stepping down and then by the time I finished East Timor going independent which was almost inconceivable two years earlier so so in a way this was an experience in which you suddenly saw that well the reality that you thought was there wasn't once the wall will collapse yes I think I came out of it with an incredible sense of complexity that we were trying to make confidence statements about the economy or confidence statements about Indonesian society and I began to realize they were based on very very little they were grand confident series which could be produced in a seminar but I really began to felt these things are inherently chaotic unpredictable uncertain and although at the time I was very proud to be standing in the streets of Jakarta with students rebelling against so hearted students socially rebelling owners of British diplomats standing alongside them I think I'd never fully thought through as a British diplomat what that was going to mean you know we talked about human rights and talk about democracy but what would that actually mean for those people over the next 10 or 15 years of their lives now once you're in the diplomatic corps then you you left and you took a leave and you said about to walk across a lot of Asia and in fact you you you walked how many miles 6,000 miles on foot to tell us about what your goal was and how that that begot in your bonnet so to speak I think I felt that the most powerful way for me to learn about the world was to walk across it because I felt that only by putting one foot in front of the other would I really be able to touch reality I liked the idea that instead of my previous experience the world which was little snapshots disconnected jumping by plane or train from one city to another I would have a sense of how the whole thing sat together I'd move more slowly through I'd see rural errands I'd spend time living in village houses I'd get a sense of what the world really was like and for me that's what walking promised it didn't quite deliver it I mean it turned out of course that you miss a lot walking there are many things you don't understand by walking but before I did I imagine that walking would somehow magically let me know what the world was really like and and you did you have athletic prowess was this something that as a Scotchman you had done a lot of walking and so on I mean it's it's a one has to start with the strength and the legs yes it's yes a big Scottish tradition walking as Scots walk a lot there's a funny man from my clan from my Highland clan called Walker Stewart who walked across the whole of India and eventually walked all the way back to Britain and the seventeen hundred's Highland Scots particularly were always very proud of walking didn't really ride horses one of the big differences in fair when they went to battle against the Scots from the borders is every one the borders was on a horse and everyone from the Highlands was on foot you you somebody who is walking in addition to the strength you're you really as your book on Afghanistan we'll talk about that in a second you're really observing you're you're listening talk a little about that because you you in a way we're really seeing things now in a way that in these other experiences when you're embedded in a bureaucracy you weren't from what you just said yeah that's right I think as a government official it's very very difficult to really learn much about other people's lives you interact with people in a very formal setting and very briefly and very business focused on the walk I stayed in 500 different village houses so every night I can sit on a mud floor and I'm there for hours you know I probably get that 4:30 in the afternoon you talk about all of Asian our just yeah yeah Iran Afghanistan Pakistan India Nepal so again and again in all these countries the same pattern I set off from a village house at about 8:30 in the morning and a by about half past 4 I've got to another village house and almost always people would work me in and I would sit down and I would be there for the next 16 hours during that time I'm forcing myself where I'm forced to do nothing except listen to people talk about themselves I become very attentive to the way they describe themselves the way they interact with visitors and it was the most most precious gift because probably in retrospect I might have been a bit frightened of people before a bit uneasy about what real people were like it made me immense the optimistic because in all those communities I came away with a very very strong sense of people's well they were good people and basically almost everybody who put me up was in somewhere another somebody who I was proud to encounter and and you you must have had a lot of empathy and sympathy as the more people you met the more so that you you came to really understand the structures that they were embedded in and it sounds to me that you found that a more human experience than the bureaucracies you've already mentioned that you were in your previous roles yes and was very very useful for me for then onwards in really talking to those bureaucracies because a lot of the basis of all discussions does matically talk about Afghanistan you're talking about domestic politics the United States involves making claims about people the American people think this the Afghan people think this this is what except this is what they won't accept this is what they want and yet most of the people having those conversations really don't have much to go on and they might do an opinion poll or something but what's always lacking in the room is somebody to confidently say no this is actually the way that I think people might think about the situational this is how they might react or this is how this might go down and we're so bad at that because what we do is we produce things which we think are a good idea and we find it very difficult to accept somebody saying ok and maybe it's a good idea but nobody's gonna want it natural instinct is for example I've just been doing a sewerage project in Afghanistan in Kabul I had this wonderful German engineer working with me and he says it's a very good idea we're gonna put in this sewage system and afghans keep saying to me it's never gonna work we don't want this thing but of course the rich and the german engineer under Saturday is what are you talking about this is irrational this is a good thing we're gonna get it going right and you end up spending a lot of time and often a lot of money doing things that don't work and why didn't they want there you know very difficult ascent immunity and and this is one of the problems for foreigners that you have to to some extent eventually just take it as read that they don't want it they can explain in different details you know so our Afghan engineer would explain that one of the problems is the way in which people wash themselves and their courtyards and mud gets into the sewage system another problem is vendetta's between families people deliberately block up the neighbors sewage pipe as a way of getting at their neighbor I mean but these these are things that are very difficult to communicate at solar panels on roofs again a wonderful idea and Afghanistan theoretically because a little bit like California's a lot of Sun but for whatever reason community is never got a Sun a very reluctant to maintain these solar plants and again the engineer says well that's absurd and all you've got to do is get on the roof and remove the sand and the dust from a solar panel every day and you'll say the panel will work well but at some point having pushed and pushed and pushed you just have to accept that for whatever reason these people do not want to go on their roof every day and clean the dust off the side of pollen and therefore solar power is not the answer to this community no no let's focus on your walk across Afghanistan which is chronicled in your book the places in between when did you undertake that journey and what what was the length of that journey and you've talked a little already about the way you observed so let's focus on that but you did it after the overthrow of the Taliban right so I set off on this long walk across Asia and I'd started out in Turkey and I'd walked across the run but the Taliban wouldn't let me into a few understand so I'd hopped and I'd walked across Pakistan and India and Nepal and I was just approaching the edge of Bangladesh when 9/11 happened the Taliban government fell and I suddenly got this chance to go to Afghanistan and I quickly realized the chance to walk from her act to Kabul so I set off to her out in the West and essentially what I was doing was trying to connect my walk across Iran with my walk across proxxon Afghanistan was that bitter in between that I'd missed and I walked across Afghanistan for I suppose sort of months and a half really it's all it took me to get from her Attica ball but it was a very curious month and a half it was a month and a half during which time I I didn't wash I obviously couldn't phone or talk to my family I disappeared basically in Herat and reappear in Kabul that stage in Afghan says no electricity between her and Kabul televisions and radios no telephones and no government no police no army no civil service see I was reliant completely on the goodwill of individual villagers who could had they wished at any moment murdered me robbed me and nobody would have found out or presumably my parents eventually after two three months of not getting a phone call would have thought well something must have so it won this took a lot of courage just just put that on the table do you sense that you had courage in doing this or was it rather your commitment to the goal of doing what you were doing it's very difficult to really answer that question I mean one of the reasons I feel uncomfortable at it is I think the this idea of courage is you know it's it's a slightly maybe overrated but I mean I think there are quite a lot of young men who like me are happy to do things like walk across Afghanistan and you know I was lucky they're lucky to make it out of life but I never felt most of the time I didn't really feel particularly frightened but at the same time I didn't think that's something that I should be immensely proud of I just think that's my personality I'm just not particularly and maybe not very imaginative at one point in your book I think you say you were you were looking at Afghanistan and being myself and that's what you've just described so in a way by by stripping away all of these are crucial months of modernity then you actually could focus and do what you were doing which I guess was interacting observing and writing interacting observing and writing and being treated by villages not as anything other than an anonymous stranger I mean I became accustomed over that 500 a walk because the Afghan walk actually was not very different in some ways to walking across around on Pakistan I just became accustomed to people taking me in very simple terms I mean there was no sense of what my background was really where I came from some of these communities the women had never been more than three hours walk from their village in their lives so that the market town I'd walked from morning was as distant to them as as Paris I mean they they so if I said to them you know I've walked here from Turkey it didn't mean anything at all and said completely meaningless and if I said I came from Scotland that was you know equally meaningless I like that because I think I'd always felt in a funny way you know I came from quite a privileged background in Britain that maybe people were judging me on the basis of my clothes my accent I didn't feel that on the walk on the walk I felt people saw this slightly disheveled figure and what did they know about him they knew that he'd somehow walk to their village from somewhere and was so there's a there's a funny kind of thing so in their seeing you stripped in a way I mean you were dressed but I mean in terms of the accoutrements of modernity or being a diplomat or being a soldier they saw you but then you were empowered to really see them and what you saw was the traditional social structures I get a sense in reading a book of the extent to which these there are many peoples in Afghanistan and they are embedded in a region in a way you talk about people going to work in Iran or or somewhere and so on so you saw a fluidity and a resilience in traditional structures that it well obviously if you were flying overhead in a helicopter you would never have seen that's right and I I like the fact that you've observed the fact that many of them had been to work in Iran or Pakistan and that they were embedded in a broader region because it's the paradox on the one hand these villages feel unbelievably isolated they're 10 days walk from the nearest road in the winter and as I say some of the women have barely been outside the edge of the village on the other hand they're surprisingly sort of aware of the outside world you know people will have walked that ten days easily and comfortably people will have been to Tehran some of them will have been to Mecca people been to Delhi and they will have understood their own country in a way we don't quite understand our country's because they will have walked twenty three days to Quetta to get weapons to fight against the Soviet Union and carried guns and mules back on their back for 28 days to get back to their village they will have used their landscape in a different way to us to mount ambushes to bury their relatives - they are aware of genealogies and histories in a way that we're not as some of these people could recite their parents and great-grandparents going back seven generations I was fascinated by all of this I mean it along with all the things which are very sad about Afghanistan and there are many many of them and I think it's much easier of course as a foreigner to romanticize the country than to actually be an Afghan trapped in it there were so many aspects of that society which were genuinely seemed moving fulfilling intriguing beautiful one of the interesting things that you lacked in this walk was power and so so they could see you just as an individual taking the walk bringing a letter from somebody to introduce you and then being given a letter on to the next one and you you bring out the sent to which they are used to Outsiders coming in and exerting power and part of their flexibility is to adapt to the new outside intervener right absolutely well as you say these these people are have both faced extraordinary internal Afghan fights the Afghan King in the 1880s and so she has enslaved that Hazara population in central Afghanistan they've seen the Soviet Union come and go they have folk tales about the British Invasion of 1841 they have strong sense of American and British forces beginning to move around if the town having arrived and then left again so yes there perpetually dealing with these shifting things but equally it's a remarkable how strong the village unit remains and in some ways you sense how irrelevant some of this has been how yes it's true that this village has seen the king come has seen the Soviet Union come has seen the Taliban carnosine but it's still in some sense the village and they've learnt to speak different kinds of language and they've learnt to deal with different kinds of people but it's still the village subsequently I believe it subsequently that you're you're you're back on special assignment in Iraq and you become the deputy governor of two provinces that's after this this war so so I'm curing this power element because now you're suddenly presented with power you're a representative of the British government in Marsh areas and in a way you you you have the accoutrements of power now but you're you're able to see things as they are both because of your previous experiences and as you're interacting you're observing and so on and you say at one point the job of an administrator in your book on this this the this experience on the ground in Iraq was not the job of a diplomat a development worker soldier it was the job of the 1920s Chicago War politician so the difference now is did you have some power but you actually confront a reality where the the social structure the the existing interactions prevail and make what we're trying to do that namely transform this into some sort of liberal democracy highly unlikely right and of course I don't know much about what a Chicago would politician really was like but my sense my sense of it is that what I was trying to is that it was chaos and you were improvising and you were pretending to have more power than you actually did and you were desperately forming alliances and trading off and I had money I was given eight million dollars a month in vacuum sealed packets which we were meant to be distributing to different people you would have an idea okay we're gonna build a big project here we'll employ is three and a half thousand people and that will suddenly be disrupted because the bombs gone off four people are demonstrating outside your building you have a sense of this very turbulent fluid and violent Society and you of course are sitting there with some things which you can do I mean you are of course connected to American British soldiers and ultimately they can send in planes and bomb people you have dollars in cash but in another sense you're completely powerless everybody knows you're gonna go you'll be there for a year at most and then you'll vanish everybody senses you're not you're not from there you don't speak the language well you don't understand the religion you have no idea of anybody's background already's a stranger to you they've all lived alongside each other for generations they know exactly who's been an Iranian spy who's been collaborating with Saddam who's and the other thing you got AB so you know it it you're you're perpetually sitting there suspiciously in meetings trying to work out whether the person is sincere whether they're trying to cheat you whether they're and you're also trying to work out what your own ideals are and what are you trying to actually do for people are you trying to clean up the police and get rid of torture how can you do that if in Abu Ghraib your own side has suddenly been shown to be torturing people you're trying to bring economic development but what's our model of economic development to you trying to bring I mean finally sounds set quickly employment infrastructure but to what extent is this stuff going to remain when you leave how does this economy really work to what extent is your cash distorting it it becomes a very very odd thing you feel that you're sort of on a waterbed we're standing on a waterbed which is kind of lurching around on you in both of these experiences you we have to bring out the other dimension of what you were as you found yourself and and and so on you you were a writer basically so you you know in a typical day you would keep a diary tell us a little about that how much would you write at night once you had lived your day well on the walk I was writing about two-and-a-half hours a day I mean the I have piles of notebooks cheap Iranian exercise books filled full of drawings and notes in Mesa and I was of course taking notes all the way through meetings not for a book it sure wasn't intending in Iraq to write a book but I maybe in the back of my mind I thought a book come out of it but most there's no it's virtually practical it's there explain recording what people are saying explaining what action points we have and what we've agreed to go well again I wonder whether being a writer helped me or didn't help me and I suddenly have a strong sense that I'm less good as a writer because I do all this politics stuff I think really good writers need to step away from that and have nothing else to to do I don't want to guess and so in a way all of these different roles soldier diplomat walker explorer official you know after an intervention you you you were learning a lot from each experience which have informed the next experience and and your overall vision so I try to relate them to each other and keep these different things fresh and feeding into each other but it is easy to come a little bit rigid in your mind I mean it's quite easy for these different experiences not to remain as as vibrant and as lively as you'd like it's quite easy to lapse back into cliches habits of mind where you begin to see your past and preset molds so yeah it's an effort it's an effort not to stop it's an effort not to just sit back and say okay now this is my view on this thing what I what I'd like but I'm not as good at as I should be is to keep looking back at these experiences and questioning myself again and again and again one of the themes that emerges in your writing is is what would fit under if I if I can use an abstract concept on is theory and practice really and what people say and what people do and and so on and and you're suggesting that there's that and you record a lot of conversations one of the ways you capture and experiences is through the dialogue let's talk a little about that because I think what what you in your book on intervention you're really seeing a conflict between our abstract theories about what's going in a place what's going on in a place like Afghanistan and Iraq versus you know what's really going on and so on and we we become captives of our abstract ideas that's right my sense is that we are obsessed with sorts of scientific descriptions of other people's societies we think in terms of economics and numbers we think in terms of grand doctrines so we have a counterinsurgency doctrine or we have rand corporations beginner's guide to nation-building and all these so-called scientific models produce these theories on how it's supposed to work not in this particular place but everywhere their universe or their global their generic and they have many flaws two of which are firstly that they find it very very very difficult to to take into account human history psychology imaginations desires resistance that they can't really deal with that so we can see this in drugs policy in the United States or Europe and it's a classic example of something which where you spend billions doing something that you can't do partly because you don't really understand human nature the second thing they find it very difficult to do is to see any value in something historical any value in something that's there before they arrive they tend to look at the past a slightly chaotic and untidy and they want to do something neat and new and clean so they often end up tearing up quite good functioning things and replacing them things that that don't work at all because they are completely allergic to to history to culture to people they didn't like that stuff they like clean tidy and also they hate they haven't walked the walk so to speak in the way you did in Afghanistan so they they don't understand the richness the depth the complexity of the way things are being done over time that's one problem the second problem is that what people are trying to do is beyond the brains of the most brilliant person in the world people are being asked somehow to go into a country like Iraq or Afghanistan and invent a political state so we alternate whether with Swedish or British for American and we turn up when we say you must have a democracy yeah but none of us really know what a democracy means in our own country I don't know really no really understand how that works how does that work with for example in very poor people in Arizona how does it work with our group communities how does corruption operate in our own countries what really is the advantage or disadvantage of an American system against a British system against a French system all that's forgotten is too complicated for us so we just turn up when we say you're going to have a democracy and we might say slightly patronizing way you know it took us a hundred years to get a democracy so it'd take you a long time sounds fine but we didn't we sort of never really know what we're talking about we don't really have a sense of what we're really offering anybody how to really explain this to people what they're gonna get out of it we have instincts you know we sort of imply if you have a democracy you'll be richer or if you have a democracy you'll be safer but actually you really are also aware that somehow you've toppled the dictator like Saddam Hussein and nobody is safer and nobody is richer it's all chaos and they've got a vote but they don't seem to have anything else and how do you explain that to people and where's that going to go and so I think they haven't walked the walk in other words they're not good enough at the granular stuff but secondly even the theories which they're trying to apply are really really flimsy you know they're all these words like the rule of law or governance but how many of the people talking about these things actually know what they mean when they talk about these things and and in a way you're these abstract ideas are then built on an edifice so with things like poor historical analogies illogic a lack of really self understanding and then mixed with all kinds of human emotion so so we're gonna go to Afghanistan because we fear you know the terrorist threat that will come from there right that's absolutely right so there's deep deep psychological things at work which make it very very difficult to actually analyze clearly that of course would be true if you were running a business but it's much more true when you invade somebody else's country fear these people pose an existential threat to global security whatever that means and then we don't know what that means I mean does Texas pose an existential threat I mean what does this mean exactly right secondly guilt oh we've invaded this country we've caused the chaos you know we've broken it we have to fix it or our soldiers have died and and we can't have soldiers dying in vain and so fear and guilt and then pride you know we are NATO we are the West you know we're going to we can't be seen to be defeated our credibility is at stake here and out of that stuff all of which has sort of trapped you there your fear your your guilt your pride has trapped you in this destructive relationship then the justifications come behind it and it's not very surprising the theories turn out to be a little bit flimsy because they're trying to justify something which is fundamentally irrational from the beginning and you make the suggestion you're quoting McNamara in the intervention book namely that that some of this is about the clash of modernity of what we perceive as being modern and so on and our ways of doing things and they're their immediate application and implementation in places that often remain very traditional and traditional here is not meant as a pejorative it's the way things have been done over time based on where these people are located their geography and so on and it's a particularly aggressive form of modernization I mean McNamara you know comes from the Ford Motor Company and was famous for his use of metrics and measurement and standardization so it's the application of a very high modernist worldview kind of thing we'd associate with central planning measurement everybody the same on societies that by their very nature are almost at the opposite end of the spectrum these are societies that have often not really gone through that process at all so there's a and it's something that happens across the developing world whether you're intervening or not there's terrible sort of collision of people with a very strong idea of how things ought to be done with the way things are you you at one point in your book you you talk about fear and you you really show how the fear of terrorism and and the reason why we have to be afraid is very much like the fear that got us into Vietnam bringing the fear of a country here but what's interesting is that when I looked at these fears I found that there were four types of fear which seemed to reoccur in almost every single time we get into a war so the first is that the fear that makes out that country as being the most dangerous thing conceivable so Ronald Reagan famously in 63 said that Vietnam posed the greatest threat that had ever faced humankind and as much from the swamp to the start the second kind of fear that you have is okay it's not this country this country is actually an empty space the problem of this country is the foreigners who come into it it's a sort of failed space and to which they come and there you can find you know Russian Foreign Ministers in the 1860s talking about you know these empty barbarian spaces that cause problems one third kind of fear that we do is we say okay it's not the country it's not the people coming into the country it's the effect on the neighbors so this of course in Vietnam is the domino theory but and Afghanistan would be if Afghanistan Falls Pakistan will form a dwellers will get their hands on nuclear weapons and then the final one is okay maybe it's not about any of this thinks it's about us it's about our credibility we can't be seen to be defeated so I was very struck by the fact that once you've got those four just matter where you go marlis Syria North Korea you can immediately apply these things you know why should we be in Syria oh you know Syria poses next central touch global security or to know the promised areas the terrorists from elsewhere who are coming into serial three no no it's the region of Syria Falls everywhere else will be destabilizing for our credibility if we don't do something we're going to be humiliated in looking at your book on intervention and looking at the way actors are driven that is the people from outside who come in you you you really show us that in in some ways the the international civil servants who come into countries the generals who come into country with their soldiers that that they all are driven by bureaucratic structures in a way that obscure their thinking and their inability to see the reality on the ground everything from the fact that it well if there's not security they have to be taken everywhere with guards they have to worry about their own careers and whether they're fulfilling the missions whether those missions have anything to do with the real this this must come from your experience these bureaucracies as you say I spend a lot of time in different kinds of bureaucracies in the army being in the Foreign Service being in the us-led occupation of Iraq I've been at Harvard I've run a non-profit minor in Parliament so these are all different forms of of bureaucracy and I suppose if I was going to produce a formal structure analysis if you're really looking at what's happening here you've got these irrational emotions like fear you've got these high and sometimes flimsy and very abstract theories on the other hand and then mediating between them driven by them in different ways is simply the incentive structure of being a soldier or being a diplomat by which I mean number one you're there to do a job you're not there to question whether the job is worthwhile you're there to do the job you that'll win secondly you don't get promoted by being negative you get promoted by being positive thirdly the entire bureaucracy gathers behind you it's a wonderful way of mobilizing agreement it's a wonderful way of creating groupthink of ignoring uncomfortable truths so it's some it's fascinating because what essentially you see as human societies can arrange themselves around projects which in retrospect are crazy but arrange themselves run them very very easily very slickly and and perhaps for me the strongest example of it is is the Crusades I mean you know we like to think about Vietnam because it's it's close but it's not a new phenomenon this if you were to sit down with somebody from the 12th century and say what an earth do you think you're doing I mean you you're a Scottish knight in shining um you're heading off to Palestine you're doing what exactly they would say oh no no no no the situation you don't quite understand you know we've got very good information what's happening in Damascus at the moment just got a good letter and from Genghis Khan we think he's coming in from this side and really the indigenous population and Jerusalem is very much on our side and we think they're a descent within the within the court of the Mamluks and the whole thing is splitting apart and you know they would have been able in the most extraordinary way to explain to you why something which we know is mad was that she sensible you talk about the generals in Afghanistan and I don't know how many commanders are us of the NATO and US forces there they've been in a decade say seven to ten or something like that and each one comes in and sees the world the same the mission previous has failed and now there's going to be new resources new leadership and so on and then when that generals term is over the next guy comes in and in there they're essentially fixing variables so if if the previous general centralized forces then the next one D central I mean it's it's a pretty telling indictment of the extent to which the futility of the effort given the structure is not perceived by the actors that's absurd the actors don't perceive the futility and and that's a really I mean you've given a a very good summary of it I suppose moving on though what do we do about this I think what we do about this is to recognize that these are almost inevitable features of huge human bureaucracies lurching themselves and to uncomfortable situations and you can't really expect to fix these things it seems to be sort of almost so hardwired in terms of the way in which our brains work the way in which our emotions work the way in which our theories work that in catastrophic situations anybody in charge whether they're a general or civilian will say oh I've inherited a dismal situation that I have a new plan requiring new resources which will deliver a decisive year and simply said about reversing everything that predecessor has done in the hope that this one sort of that the lesson therefore is to be unbelievably cautious about getting into these things in the first place because once you're there it's not that people that ill-intentioned or stupid these are highly able highly intelligent highly diligent individuals but they are trapped they cannot see outside that system they really resent this kind of analysis I mean nobody wants to feel that they're somehow blind prisoners destruction so they hate anybody saying this to them nevertheless I think it's true I think in 20 30 years time people will look back and think unless they think they were doing and you and your student at Harvard you actually tried to gather a group of fellows who actually knew Afghanistan because they knew the language they had lived there they had worked in a sector like agriculture and so on and you were trying to create a body of information and on the one hand convey it to students through teaching but also interacting with with prominent officials like Petraeus and Holbrooke and what you're telling us is the Titanic wouldn't turn from the iceberg the Titanic definitely doesn't turn it General Petraeus about the holbrook were very generous at that time but I never convinced them and it's already about me I mean these guys that I had it have a knew far more about Afghanistan that I did I had 20 30 years of experience each of them of the place couldn't convince them not to search we all saw that the search was crazy we should not be putting more troops into Afghanistan but it didn't matter how much those individuals in Harvard knew about Afghanistan they just couldn't stop the system more worrying though for me was was perhaps the students these very brilliant students that I had at Harvard basically thought in the end I think that I was exaggerating that I was overly cynical that I was a sort of colorful character who was um being contrarian but couldn't really take on board or accept that things were quite as bad as I said so at the end of my class many people would continue to say oh well you know we need is a new plan with new resources and that'll sorted out many of the men she went out to work for these institutions in Afghanistan that I'd been trying to expose so the lesson here if if I can be so bold as to is don't get into places in the first place but what what I'm curious about is what you see the role of a political education you're in politics now I mean is is part of your job and if it is how do you do it to educate people or policymakers to actually add some increment of knowledge to once they're in these structures and in these places to navigate better is that yes I think that's for me one of the most important potential roles of a politician because politicians by their nature are semi detached from bureaucracies and are compelled in order to get elected but also out of personality to spend a lot of time with people who are not professional government people in our districts or ever the most useful thing a politician can do is to try to be sufficiently objective or detach from bureaucracy for President Obama for example to say to the military I think you're wrong I don't think the search is gonna work I didn't think this counterinsurgency strategy is going to get you what you want to be but it's difficult it's difficult you're talking to a general with a row of medals on his chest who's been five years in the ground in Afghanistan and you're a new president I mean and you don't really know much about the country have you really got the confidence the instincts the arguments to overcome this stuff because we're trained to think that we're rational we're trained to think that we can argue our way out of these things but it's very very difficult because actually after five six years of one of these interventions the side that's wrong has a lot of very attractive convincing arguments there's a lot of things they say well unless you fight with them day in day out sound on the surface pretty good you've been a observer of humanity in all kinds of settings what what is what conclusion have you come to basically basically I suppose intuitively generally I mean it's a ridiculous generalization but generally I'm pretty optimistic about people I generally feel that you can explain almost anything to people people get things I mean they they understand in their everyday lives and most people I deal with are extraordinary in their energies and their compassion and their capacities to do things and so I'm optimally about people but I'm pretty doubtful about government bureaucracies and structures and ideas so my general conclusion is that the only role I really have is to act as a sort of lens between people and government back and forth trying to explain the two sides to each other in my country 87% of people feel politics is broken eighty-eight percent of things society is broken I'm conscious having not always been a politician that people think politics are the worst people on earth I mean they really think we are corrupt incompetent thieves and lies but our salvation or very important part of our salvation has to remind somehow sorting this out getting these two sides to understand each other getting these two sides to challenge each other getting these two sides to become better through that conversation so in a way it's it's observing and and confronting reality but but stripping yourself of the abstract theories and the human passions that that prevent you from actually doing that act and try to draw some conclusion that brings that it's I mean it can work in a lot of different ways it could be for example that my constituents want to have superfast broadband live in remote rural communities where the government can't afford provided and are prepared to dig the trench and lay the fiber optic cable themselves and the government will say we can't do that we can't do that for legal reasons we can't do that procurement reasons we can't do that technological reasons and you know it's nonsense you know there's no reason actually it only any sense why couldn't the government do this these people have had a daughter's wedding so a lot of the work of the politician is simply just saying again and again why why why I mean it's it's a cheap almost quite a naive role being a politician one final question tell us a little about your non-governmental organization because in Afghanistan because you're you're obviously building on all of this experience well that that's probably the project which I've been most proud of in my entire life the one thing that I really really have loved and it is a project where we've gone into the Northern District to the old city Kabul which was a slum it was seven feet deep and rubbish and parts the buildings were derelict and collapsing one in five children were dying before the age of five had up life expectancy was 37 and there were beautiful crafts traditional woodworkers and calligraphers but they had no students to whom they could pass on their skills so we went in I started with one employee for two of us and we've built it up to about 600 people working with us now we cleaned out all the garbage we've installed water supply electricity sewage we've repaired over 90 buildings we've got an Institute for training craftspeople we're beginning to do international exhibitions so these beautiful pieces woodwork or ceramics or calligraphy around the world or jewelry and get the money back into the old city to sustain a clinic a primary school and I love it I love it because it's a concrete real community I walk down that Bazar Street and I've known these people for years and if they don't like what's happening they pop out of their shops and they shout at me and that's what I like and what is it called project took boys melted and then one final question how would you advise students to prepare for the future what might my instinct with that is for them to go abroad and to live in somewhere very different a small rural community as a volunteer or like in the Peace Corps because nothing is more exciting or important than having in the back of your mind for the rest of your life somewhere very different from where you are there's a way of challenging the received with well on that note Rory thank you very much for taking the time to share with us your remarkable Odyssey thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 81,655

Keywords: Rory Stewart, Iraq, Afghanistan

Id: 6Qg9WqAyOCM

Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2013